Yesterday was an amazing day in the history of the United States of America. Yesterday we witnessed something that was almost beyond words, a stirring, amazing scene that reminds us of the possibilities and hope of this country; Something that defies history and flies in the face of common wisdom; Something momentous and generation defining; Something many of us never thought we’d see in our lifetime.

Yeah, the Democrats nominated a black guy as their candidate, but that doesn’t surprise me one bit, as it has been the only rational option for more than a year now.

What I am talking about is the even more amazing, more groundbreaking, more alert-the-media surprise moment of history: Bubba passed the torch. And sounded like he meant it.

But the night belonged to Bubba. The former president and Democratic Top Dog took the stage to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” (his campaign theme that not only carried him to the White House, but convinced the band to get back together) garnered a hero’s welcome that had him asking the jubilant and adoring crowd to settle so they wouldn’t take all his time and then delivered the kind of talk that made his name: a brilliant, soaring bit of oratory that not only framed the entire election, but answered almost every question the Clintons raised but Hillary failed to answer the night before.

Former president Bill Clinton dropped a hint Monday that the end might be nigh for his wife Hillary’s dogged campaign for the Democratic White House nomination, according to reports.

“I want to say also that this may be the last day I’m ever involved in a campaign of this kind,” the former president told Clinton supporters in South Dakota, ABC and NBC reported on their news websites.

“I thought I was out of politics, till Hillary decided to run. But it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to go around and campaign for her for president,” he added at the start of his stump speech.

A magazine that managed to make Angelina Jolie look like a porn star has written a long and sexified analysis of Bill Clinton. Yesterday, reportsstarted up about Bubba’s reaction to the piece:

The Office of President Bill Clinton responded with fury Sunday to a Vanity Fair article that attacks the former president and suggests he is out of control personally and consumed by “cavernous narcissism.”

and reporters started trudging through the boring mass of fluff to find the tidbits of what we already knew:

More devastating is Purdum’s claim that about 18 months ago, a former Clinton aide tried an intervention with the former president because he was hearing so many complaints about inappropriate behavior.

According to the article, the aide believed “Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road.”

Today, the Clintons angrily continue to deny that Bill Clinton is an angry kind of guy:

The Clinton camp responded today to Vanity Fair’s long article on Bill with its own 2,476-word memo, which includes attacks on the magazine’s “penchant for libel,” on editor Graydon Carter, and on writer Todd Purdum and his wife, former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers.

Hillary Clinton’s husband is still brilliant, still passionate and still a magnificent campaigner. But people who have known him and observers who have watched Bill Clinton for decades say he’s lost at least half a step.

My fictional Eliot would be complex, would contain paradoxes. He would not be a hypocrite. My Eliot would believe with his whole heart in his crusades against the corrupt and the powerful and the privileged, even as he worked studiously to undermine his legacy. Fiction can accommodate such paradoxes, provided they’re explained.

It has everything: Sex, money, power, stunning hypocrisy, flawed leading character AND a high-class call girl with big time music industry dreams and a history of abuse. Shit, someone call Tom Wolfe quick before Russo writes it.

but more likely I expect an actual Law and Order episode (special victims unit, maybe) to already be in the works based on this sordid little tale…

I watched an episode on saturday in which beings with great powers disguised themselves as humans and took over the ship and the crew realized that they didn’t understand their human emotions and feelings and had to distract them so Kirk went about trying to seduce the blond woman who was really a 100-foot-long multi-tentacled alien. gotta love that guy.

it’s like if Bubba were a starship captain.

and the ‘beings with great powers’ are apparently kelvans and hidden tentacles or not, it’s tough to blame him…

“Mr. Clinton’s temper has been an issue for him as long as he has been in public life. But it has played an unusual role during the current campaign, his face turning red in public nearly every week, often making headlines as he defends his wife and injects himself, whether or not intentionally, into her race in sometimes distracting ways.

Some Clinton advisers say the campaign is trying to rein him in somewhat, so that his outbursts become less of a factor to reporters, but his flashes of anger only seem to be growing.”

I don’t pretend to have any insider knowledge or anything, but maybe the problem is that with all the extra focus of reporters now that he is back on the road, Bubba can’t get away for a piece of tail now and again and he is starting to get a little backed up.

And I think we can all relate to that…

In an unrelated note, yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the drudge report item saying Newsweek had killed a story about the president having an affair with un-named intern…

by twit

UPDATE: It looks like this famous Bubba temper, it actually doesn’t have to exist to get reported on as being a temper, but anyways, via PoliticsTV.com, here’s a clip entitled BILL CLINTON: Lashes Out at Reporter over Vegas Caucus Lawsuit.

On Thursday, the Reno Gazette Journal endorsed Sen. Barack Obama as the best choice for the Democratic party’s nomination. They cited his talk of unity and change and ability to cite both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan as agents of change.

According to a CBS reporter, John Edwards jumped all over Obama for the Reagan reference:

“When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people,” said Edwards.

“He was openly – openly – intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment.”

“I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.”

Edwards isn’t wrong. Reagan fucked over the middle class, sold out the government to private interests, tripled the national debt, ignored AIDS, made ketchup a vegetable in public schools and rolled back a bunch of environmental advances.

But he isn’t right, either. Reagan’s election in 1980 set the tone for the next 12 years. I grew up in the 80s, so I have no recollection of what happened before, but even a cursory glance shows the structural changes and cultural ripple effects that still has all of the Republican candidates drooling all over which blowhard is the most fit to carry Reagan’s jock strap.

For the record, here is the actual quote to which the Edwards campaign was responding:

“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

There’s been a lot of talk of “change” this election season but the real question is what that change means to the person who says it. Today, we got a look at what two of the Democratic candidates mean when they say change.

Obama apparently means one of those fundamental shifts in the way we look at things. A new generation rising to power and bringing with it a different world view, a new, more interconnected sensibility that draws the best parts of both sides of the aisle.

Edwards version of change is an old definition, a change of faces and rhetoric, but the same world view we’ve been arguing over for decades.

It is time to sluff off the world view of the Baby Boomers. I am appreciative of what they’ve done, but they are still fighting the same fights while the world is moving past them.

You can’t really blame Edwards for wanting to improve the VCR, but i think it might be time to take a chance on this up and coming DVD technology…

UPDATE: Well, Bill and Hillary Clinton both weighed in on this proving they too are just building a better VCR. They are both still struggling with the difference is the word change and are happy to distort what Obama said (though his campaign’s response was admittedly disappointing) in a distinctly Boomer political maneuver.

The report is at TPMelectioncentral and links to Bubba and Obama’s additions are at the bottom.